OYSTER BAY, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Established mobile baseband processor chipset vendors will certainly
remain key players as the shift towards LTE continues. Qualcomm is
dominating LTE chipset sales so far with over two-thirds of shipments in
2012. “We expect Broadcom and Intel to be significant challengers to
Qualcomm over the next few years,” stated research director Philip
Solis, “and some of the smaller LTE baseband vendors will grab a part of
the LTE chipset market that will grow to well over 850 million shipments
in 2018 for handsets alone.”

LTE vendors offering integrated platforms can allow OEMs to design
products more easily and quickly. At the same time, however, companies
that only offer standalone LTE baseband processors can do fine if they
are offering reference designs and related services. Beyond that,
cutting edge features are important.

Vendors are focusing on various features; four are offering integrated
platforms; and four are offering carrier aggregation now. 12 vendors
offer 23 products supporting Category 3, and five offer ten products
supporting Category 4. There are no Category 5 products on the market
yet, which would have a more limited potential since they require 4X4
MIMO. Nine vendors have LTE baseband products supporting TD-SCDMA to
target China.

Different levels of integration and standalone components will be
required for some time because of the timing of various technology
shifts across the different components. Combined with the singlemode LTE
opportunity for non-handset mobile devices and the wider Internet of
Everything in the near term and even handsets in the long term,
singlemode LTE baseband vendors have an opportunity.

Only five companies – Altair, GCT, Innofidei, Leadcore, and Sequans –
offer singlemode LTE chipsets at the moment. “Eventually, the larger
vendors will offer singlemode LTE products, but only after the
opportunity for those products becomes much more sizable,” added Solis.
“This is a rare opportunity for these smaller vendors to get market
traction relatively unimpeded.”

ABI Research provides in-depth analysis and quantitative forecasting of
trends in global connectivity and other emerging technologies. From
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of experts advises thousands of decision makers through 70+ research and
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